Once he said: “Oh, I’m no damned good! I should have died!”
That whole day passed without consciousness, and most of the night. At two in the morning Angela woke and asked to see the baby. The nurse brought it. Eugene held her hand. It was put down beside her, and she cried for joy, but it was a weak, soundless cry. Eugene cried also.
“It’s a girl, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Eugene, and then, after a pause, “Angela, I want to tell you something. I’m so sorry, I’m ashamed. I want you to get well. I’ll do better. Really I will.” At the same time he was wondering, almost subconsciously, whether he would or no. Wouldn’t it be all the same if she were really well—or worse?
She caressed his hand. “Don’t cry,” she said, “I’ll be all right. I’m going to get well. We’ll both do better. It’s as much my fault as yours. I’ve been too hard.” She worked at his fingers, but he only choked. His vocal cords hurt him.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” he finally managed to say.
The child was taken away after a little while and Angela was feverish again. She grew very weak, so weak that although she was conscious later, she could not speak. She tried to make some signs. Eugene, the nurse, Myrtle, understood. The baby. It was brought and held up before her. She smiled a weak, yearning smile and looked at Eugene. “I’ll take care of her,” he said, bending over her. He swore a great oath to himself. He would be decent—he would be clean henceforth and for ever. The child was put beside her for a little while, but she could not move. She sank steadily and died.
Eugene sat by the bed holding his head in his hands. So, he had his wish. She was really dead. Now he had been taught what it was to fly in the face of conscience, instinct, immutable law. He sat there an hour while Myrtle begged him to come away.
“Please, Eugene!” she said. “Please!”
“No, no,” he replied. “Where shall I go? I am well enough here.”
After a time he did go, however, wondering how he would adjust his life from now on. Who would take care of of——
“Angela” came the name to his mind. Yes, he would call her “Angela.” He had heard someone say she was going to have pale yellow hair.
The rest of this story is a record of philosophic doubt and speculation and a gradual return to normality, his kind of normality—the artistic normality of which he was capable. He would—he thought—never again be the maundering sentimentalist and enthusiast, imagining perfection in every beautiful woman that he saw. Yet there was a period when, had Suzanne returned suddenly, all would have been as before between them, and even more so, despite his tremulousness of spirit, his speculative interest in Christian Science as a way out possibly, his sense of brutality, almost murder, in the case of Angela—for, the old attraction still gnawed at his vitals. Although he had Angela, junior, now to look after, and in a way to divert him,—a child whom he came speedily to delight in—his fortune to restore, and a sense of responsibility to that abstract thing, society or public opinion as represented by those he knew or who knew him, still there was this ache and this non-controllable sense of adventure which freedom to contract a new matrimonial alliance or build his life on the plan he schemed with Suzanne gave him. Suzanne! Suzanne!—how her face, her gestures, her voice, haunted him. Not Angela, for all the pathos of her tragic ending, but Suzanne. He thought of Angela often—those last hours in the hospital, her last commanding look which meant “please look after our child,” and whenever he did so his vocal cords tightened as under the grip of a hand and his eyes threatened to overflow, but even so, and even then, that undertow, that mystic cord that seemed to pull from his solar plexus outward, was to Suzanne and to her only. Suzanne! Suzanne! Around her hair, the thought of her smile, her indescribable presence, was built all that substance of romance which he had hoped to enjoy and which now, in absence and probably final separation, glowed with a radiance which no doubt the reality could never have had.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and only of dreams are our keen, stinging realities compounded. Nothing else is so moving, so vital, so painful as a dream.
For a time that first spring and summer, while Myrtle looked after little Angela and Eugene went to live with her and her husband, he visited his old Christian Science practitioner, Mrs. Johns. He had not been much impressed with the result in Angela’s case, but Myrtle explained the difficulty of the situation in a plausible way. He was in a terrific state of depression, and it was while he was so that Myrtle persuaded him to go again. She insisted that Mrs. Johns would overcome his morbid gloom, anyhow, and make him feel better. “You want to come out of this, Eugene,” she pleaded. “You will never do anything until you do. You are a big man. Life isn’t over. It’s just begun. You’re going to get well and strong again. Don’t worry. Everything that is is for the best.”
He went once, quarreling with himself for doing so, for in spite of his great shocks, or rather because of them, he had no faith in religious conclusions of any kind. Angela had not been saved. Why should he?
Still the metaphysical urge was something—it was so hard to suffer spiritually and not believe there was some way out. At times he hated Suzanne for her indifference. If ever she came back he would show her. There would be no feeble urgings and pleadings the next time. She had led him into this trap, knowing well what she was doing—for she was wise enough—and then had lightly deserted him. Was that the action of a large spirit? he asked himself. Would the wonderful something he thought he saw there be capable of that? Ah, those hours at Daleview—that one stinging encounter in Canada!—the night she danced with him so wonderfully!
During a period of nearly three years all the vagaries and alterations which can possibly afflict a groping and morbid mind were his. He went from what might be described as almost a belief in Christian Science to almost a belief that a devil ruled the world, a Gargantuan Brobdingnagian Mountebank, who plotted tragedy for all ideals and rejoiced in swine and dullards and a grunting, sweating, beefy immorality. By degrees his God, if he could have been said to have had one in his consciousness, sank back into a dual personality or a compound of good and evil—the most ideal and ascetic good, as well as the most fantastic and swinish evil. His God, for a time at least, was a God of storms and horrors as well as of serenities and perfections. He then reached a state not of abnegation, but of philosophic open-mindedness or agnosticism. He came to know that he did not know what to believe. All apparently was permitted, nothing fixed. Perhaps life loved only change, equation, drama, laughter. When in moments of private speculation or social argument he was prone to condemn it loudest, he realized that at worst and at best it was beautiful, artistic, gay, that, however, he might age, groan, complain, withdraw, wither, still, in spite of him, this large thing which he at once loved and detested was sparkling on. He might quarrel, but it did not care; he might fail or die, but it could not. He was negligible—but, oh, the sting and delight of its inner shrines and favorable illusions.
And curiously, for a time, even while he was changing in this way, he went back to see Mrs. Johns, principally because he liked her. She seemed to be a motherly soul to him, contributing some of the old atmosphere he had enjoyed in his own home in Alexandria. This woman, from working constantly in the esoteric depths, which Mrs. Eddy’s book suggests, demonstrating for herself, as she thought, through her belief in or understanding of, the oneness of the universe (its non-malicious, affectionate control, the non-existence of fear, pain, disease, and death itself), had become so grounded in her faith that evil positively did not exist save in the belief of mortals, that at times she almost convinced Eugene that it was so. He speculated long and deeply along these lines with her. He had come to lean on her in his misery quite as a boy might on his mother.
The universe to her was, as Mrs. Eddy said, spiritual, not material, and no wretched condition, however seemingly powerful, could hold against the truth—could gainsay divine harmony. God was good. All that is, is God. Hence all that is, is good or it is an illusion. It could not be otherwise. She looked at Eugene’s case, as she had at many a similar one, being sure, in her earnest way, that she, by realizing his ultimate fundamental spirituality, could bring him out of his illusions, and make him see the real spirituality of things, in which the world of flesh and desire had no part.